Creaturely and Other Essays

The author puts forward a bracing theory of partial empathy....Johnston's searching book of thought-probes goes a long way toward allowing the reader the grounding that would allow him to make empathic contacts with the animals over which he ponders....Each time another animal becomes extinct a special and irretrievable way of looking at the world is gone....Perhaps the more people that read this book, the more this absence would be poignantly felt.--The Brooklyn Rail

Creaturely, like its subjects, eludes definition. It's a book of exquisite essays--or are they prose poems--that tessellate into something larger: a meditation, perhaps, or a vision. Johnston's subject is at once the absolute otherness of the creatures with whom we share the world's everyday spaces--dogs, owls, mice, squirrels, crows--and the worth of our attempts to get to know them. Modest, calm, and beautiful, this is an exceptional book.--Robert Macfarlane

Devin Johnston teaches at St. Louis University. He was named a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Sources, published by Turtle Point Press.